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Archive for the ‘astronomy’ Category

Two Weeks in the Quiet Zone…

Posted in astronomy, nrao, paper, personal, science on May 25, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Hello to those of you who haven’t given up on me ever posting here again! I’m slowly getting back to a normal schedule after spending two weeks in Green Bank, West Virginia, in the Radio Quiet Zone. What’s that, you ask? Well, I wrote a two-parter all about radio astronomy’s own version of “light pollution” [...]

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UVa’s McCormick Observatory Celebrates Quasquicentennial!

Posted in astronomy, history, telescope, virginia on April 12, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Okay, that word makes me giggle. Quasquicentennial. It means 125 years, and that’s how old the McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia is on April 13 (tomorrow)! Many people know it on Grounds as that dome on O-Hill if they’ve hiked or run the trails back there. Other students have been there for a [...]

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Listening “Above the Sky”

Posted in astronomy, carnival, cool, music, space on April 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

While I was at the #SDOisGO tweetup, I got to meet a really cool, fun, and sweet musician who drove all the way through the snow down from Jersey to be there. Yes, I am talking about the lovely CraftLass! She has released her new album of folk pop, science and space songs, called “Above [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week: Blazar

Posted in AGN, astronomy, black holes, jargon, science, superluminal on April 7, 2010 | 3 Comments »

This week’s… last week’s… aw, did I miss a week? Anyway, THIS week’s “astrojargon” has a super-fun name, and it’s a pretty fun object as well. I’m talking about blazars. This is a subclass of AGN, the jargon with which I started my series. A blazar is highly variable, very luminous, and quite polarized. (Polarization [...]

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Dirty Snowballs… In April

Posted in astronomy, comet, dsbk, outreach on April 1, 2010 | 3 Comments »

In preparation for tomorrow’s meeting of Dark Skies, Bright Kids, we decided to test our comet making skills before we unleashed 17 elementary school kids upon our activity. We’re making a physical analog of a comet, with dirt, water, sand, syrup (for the organic molecules), and a little bit of ammonia (a spritz of glass [...]

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Telescopes from Space!

Posted in astronauts, astronomy, carnival, nrao, space on March 31, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut currently living aboard the International Space Station as part of Expedition 23, loves sending back gorgeous pictures of the Earth and Moon via his Twitter feed, astro_soichi. This morning, I woke up to a lovely picture of the Atacama Desert, complete with a from-orbit view of the ALMA OSF: Click a [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week: HI

Posted in astronomy, jargon, nrao on March 27, 2010 | 1 Comment »

For this week’s (late) AstroJargon, I’d like to point out a bit of jargon I used in my Ada Lovelace post the other day. I talked all about HI (the letter “H” and the Roman numeral one) studies, and before posting, I quickly inserted “neutral hydrogen” as a definition. But why is that important anyway? [...]

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Nan Dieter Conklin: Two Paths to Heaven’s Gate

Posted in astronomy, lovelace, science, women on March 24, 2010 | 6 Comments »

This year, for Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to celebrate women in technology and science by celebrating the life of another early pioneer of radio astronomy: Nan Dieter Conklin. (If you haven’t, check out last year’s post on Ruby Payne-Scott!) A couple of years ago, I picked up Nan’s memoirs, “Two Paths to Heaven’s Gate” [...]

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My Very First Teaching Gig!

Posted in astronomy, teaching on March 17, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Okay, I am pretty darn excited. I get to teach my very first class ever this summer! Grad students don’t normally teach astronomy classes at the University of Virginia except during the summer semesters. The classes are a little over two hours a day, five days a week! The topic? Life Beyond Earth. *SQUEE!* Professors [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week: Parsec

Posted in astronomy, carnival, jargon, space on March 15, 2010 | 9 Comments »

This week I thought I’d scale back from such a rich topic as AGN and tell you a little bit about the parsec. (In this case, I do not mean the podcast awards!) A parsec is a measure of distance. But, you are thinking, Nicole, don’t you astronomers already use the light year as a [...]

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